Waking And Waiting

"It's amazing when you think of it," said Adell. His broad face had lines of weariness in it, and he stirred his drink slowly with a glass rod, watching the cubes of ice slur clumsily about. "All the energy we can possibly ever use for free.
-copied from here.

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
          But to be young was very heaven!

-copied from here. 

"'It was an air. For a bit, while the human race waited, it felt kind of like wakin' after a fever had broken.'"
-Poul Anderson, World Without Stars (New York, 1966), Chapter XV, p. 110.

These quotations are from:

a science fiction short story by Isaac Asimov;
a poem by William Wordsworth;
a science fiction novel by Poul Anderson.

They are about:

unlimited solar energy;
the French Revolution;
the imminent production of the antithanatic.

In each case, a major change for the better is imminent and there is a short period of joyous anticipation. Sometimes we as individuals experience such a period. Less often, an entire society experiences it. Slavery was ended. Apartheid was ended. Starvation will be ended.